I always laugh when someone from the
American Medical Association or some other doctors’ organization claims that
doctors have no special powers over people. After I finish laughing, I always
ask how many people can tell you to take off your clothes and you’ll do it.

Because doctors are really the
priests of the Church of Modern Medicine, most people don’t deny them their
extra influence over our lives. After all, most doctors are honest, dedicated,
intelligent, committed, healthy, educated, and capable, aren’t they? The doctor
is the rock upon which Modern Medicine’s Church is built, isn’t he?

Not by a long shot. Doctors are only
human — in the worst ways. You can’t assume your doctor is any of the nice
things listed above, because doctors turn out to be dishonest, corrupt,
unethical, sick, poorly educated, and downright stupid more often than the rest
of society.

My favorite example of how doctors
can be less intelligent than the situation calls for is a matter of public
record. As part of the hearings before the Senate Health Subcommittee, Senator
Edward Kennedy recalled a skiing injury to his shoulder, suffered when he was a
young man. His father called in four specialists to examine the boy and
recommend treatment. Three recommended surgery. The advice of the fourth doctor,
who did not recommend surgery, was followed, however. He had just as many
degrees as the others. The injury healed. Senator Kennedy’s colleagues then
proceeded to question Dr. Lawrence Weed, Professor of Medicine at the University
of Vermont and originator of a highly popular patient record system for
hospitals. Dr. Weed’s reply was that the “senator’s shoulder probably would have
healed as satisfactorily if the operation hadn’t been performed.”

When doctors are formally tested, the
results are less than encouraging. In a recent test involving the prescribing of
antibiotics half of the doctors who voluntarily took the test scored
sixty-eight percent or lower. We’ve already seen in the previous chapters how
dangerous it is to have a doctor work on you. All of that danger doesn’t
necessarily derive from the inherent risks of the treatment itself. Doctors
simply botch some of those procedures. When I meet a doctor, I generally
figure I’m meeting a person who is narrow minded, prejudiced, and fairly
incapable of reasoning and deliberation. Few of the doctors I meet prove my
prediction wrong.

Doctors can’t be counted on to be
entirely ethical, either. The dean of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Robert H.
Ebert, and the dean of the Yale Medical School, Dr. Lewis Thomas, acted as paid
consultants to the Squibb Corporation at the same time they were trying to
persuade the Food and Drug Administration to lift the ban on Mysteclin, one of
Squibb’s biggest moneymakers. Dr. Ebert that he “gave the best advice I could.
These were honest opinions.” But he also declined to specify the amount of the
“modest retainer” Squibb Vice-President Norman R. Ritter admitted paying him and
Dr. Thomas. Dr. Ebert later became a paid director of the drug company and
admitted to owning stock valued at $15,000.

In 1972, Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, then
of Case-Western Reserve University, one of the world’s authorities on chemical
causes of cancer and birth defects, told the Senate Select Committee on
Nutrition and Human Needs that “the National Academy of Sciences is rid­dled
with conflict of interest.” He reported that panels that decide on crucial
issues such as safety of food additives frequently are dominated by friends or
direct associates of the interests that are supposed to be regulated. “In this
country you can buy the data you require to support your case,” he said.

Fraud in scientific research is
commonplace enough to keep it off the front pages. The Food and Drug
Administration has uncovered such niceties as overdosing and underdosing of
patients, fabrication of records, and drug dumping when they investigate
experimental drug trials. Of course, in these instances, doctors working for
drug companies have as their goal producing results that will convince the FDA
to approve the drug. Sometimes, with competition for grant money getting more
and more fierce, doctors simply want to produce results that will keep the
funding lines open. Since all the “good ol’ boy” researchers are in the same
boat, there seems to be a great tolerance for sloppy experiments, unconfirmable
results, and carelessness in interpreting results.

Dr. Ernest Borek, a University of
Colorado microbiologist, said that “increasing amounts of faked data or, less
flagrantly, data with body English put on them, make their way into
scientific journals.” Nobel Prize winner Salvadore E. Luria, a biologist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said “I know of at least two cases in
which highly respected scientists had to retract findings re­ported from their
laboratories, because they discovered that these findings had been manufactured
by one of their collaborators.”

Another now classic example of fraud
occurred in the Sloane-Kettering Institute where investigator Dr. William
Summerlin admitted painting mice to make them look as though successful
skin grafts had been done. A predecessor to Dr. Summerlin in the field of
painting animals was Paul Kammerer, the Austrian geneticist, who early in the
twentieth century painted the foot of a toad in order to prove the Lamarckian
theory of transmission of acquired traits. When he was later exposed in Arthur
Koessler’s book, The Case of the Midwife Toad, Kammerer shot himself.

Dr. Richard W. Roberts, director of
the National Bureau of Standards, said that “half or more of the numerical data
published by scientists in their journal articles is unusable because there is
no evidence that the researcher accurately measured what he thought he was
measuring or no evidence that possible sources of error eliminated or accounted
for.” Since it is almost impossible for the average reader of scientific
journals to determine which half of the article is usable and which is not, you
have to wonder whether the medical journals serve as avenues of communication or
confusion.

One method of judging the validity of
a scientific article is to examine the footnote for the source of funding. Drug
companies’ records regarding integrity of research are not sparkling enough to
warrant much trust. Doctors have been shown not to be above fudging and even
fabricating research results when the stakes were high enough. Dr.
Leroy Wolins, a psychologist at Iowa State University, had a student write to
thirty-seven authors of scientific reports asking for the raw data on which they
based their conclusions. Of the thirty-two who replied, twenty-one said their
data either been lost or accidentally destroyed. Dr. Wolins analyzed seven sets
of data that did come in and found errors in three significant enough to
invalidate what had been passed off as scientific fact.

Of course, research fraud is nothing
new. Cyril Burt, the late British psychologist who became famous for his claims
most human intelligence is determined by heredity, was exposed as a fraud by
Leon Kamin, a Princeton psychologist. It seems that the “coworkers” responsible
for Burt’s research findings could not be found to have actually existed! There
is even evidence that Gregor Mendel, father of the gene theory of heredity, may
have doctored the results of his pea-breeding experiments to make them conform
more perfectly to his theory. Mendel’s conclusions were correct, but a
statistical analysis of his published data shows that the odds were 10,000 to
one against their having been obtained through experiments such as Mendel
performed.

Doctors’ unethical behavior is not
limited to the medical business. A doctor whose name is practically synonymous
with development of a major surgical procedure was convicted of five counts of
income tax evasion for omitting more than $250,000 from returns for 1964 through
1968. A few years ago the chairman of the Board of the American Medical
Association was indicted, convicted, and sentenced to eighteen months in jail
after pleading guilty to participating in a conspiracy to misuse $1.8 million in
bank funds. According to the FBI, he and his codefendants had conspired to
“obtain unsound indirect loans for their own interest. . .paying bank funds on
checks which had insufficient funds to back them. . .and defrauding the
government. . .”

Keep in mind that these shenanigans
are going on at the highest levels of the medical profession. If this kind of
dishonesty, fraud, and thievery is going on among the bishops and cardinals of
Modern Medicine at Yale and Harvard and the National Academy of Sci­ences and
the AMA, imagine what is going on among the parish priests at the other medical
schools and medical societies!

Perhaps the most telling
characteristic of the profession that is supposed to deliver health care
is that doctors, as a group, appear to be sicker than the rest of society.
Conservative counts peg the number of psychiatrically disturbed physicians in
the U.S. at 17,000 or one in twenty, the number of alcoholics at more than
30,000, and the number of narcotics addicts at 3,500 or one per­cent. A
thirty-year study comparing doctors with professionals of similar socio-economic
and intellectual status found that by the end of the study nearly half the
doctors were divorced or unhappily mar­ried, more than a third used drugs such
as amphetamines, barbitu­rates, or other narcotics, and a third had suffered
emotional prob­lems severe enough to require at least ten trips to a
psychiatrist. The control group of non-doctors didn’t fare nearly as badly.

Doctors are from thirty to one
hundred times more likely than lay people to abuse narcotics, depending on the
particular drug. At a semiannual meeting of the American Medical Association in
1972, surveys cited showed that nearly two percent of the doctors practic­ing in
Oregon and Arizona had been disciplined by state licensing authorities for drug
abuse. An even larger percentage got into trou­ble for excessive drinking. Even
the AMA admits that one and one-half percent of the doctors in the United States
abuse drugs. Various reform and rehabilitation measures over the years have not
changed these percentages. Keep in mind that these figures repre­sent only the
identified cases. In Illinois, for example, Dr. James West, chairman of the
Illinois Medical Society’s Panel for the Im­paired Physician, reported that four
percent rather than two percent of Illinois doctors are narcotics addicts. He
further estimated that eleven-and-one-half percent were alcoholics - one in
nine.

Suicide accounts for more deaths
among doctors than car and plane crashes, drownings, and homicides combined.
Doctors’ suicide rate is twice the average for all white Americans. Every
year, about 100 doctors commit suicide, a number equal to the graduating class
of the average medical school. Furthermore, the suicide rate among female
physicians is neatly four times higher than that for other women over age
twenty-five.

Apologists for the medical profession
cite several reasons for doctors’ high rate of sickness. The drugs are easily
available to them; they must work long hours under severe stress; their
background and psychological makeup predisposes them to stretch their powers to
the limits; and their patients and the community make excessive demands on them.
Of course, whether or not you accept these reasons, they don’t explain away the
fact that doctors are a very sick group of people.

Nonetheless, I prefer to look for
more reasons. Fraud and corruption in the research process comes as no surprise
to anyone who witnesses the lengths to which drug and formula companies go to
doctors to their way of thinking. Free dinners, cocktails, conventions, and
subsidized research fellowships still are only superficial explanations. When
you examine the psychological and moral climate of Modern Medicine, you begin to
get closer to understanding why doctors are so unhealthy.

Medical politics, for example, is a
cutthroat power game of the most primitive sort. I much prefer political
politics, because there you have the art of the possible,which
means you have to compromise. Medical politics is the art of sheer power. There
is no compromise: you go right for the jugular vein before your own is torn out.
There’s no room for compromise because churches never compromise on canon
law. Instead of a relatively open process in which people with different
interests get together to try to get the most out of the situation that they
can, in medical politics there is a rigid authoritarian power structure which
can be moved only through winner-take-all power plays. Historically, doctors who
have dared to change things significantly have been ostracized and have had to
sacrifice their careers in order to hold to their ideas. Few doctors are willing
to do either.

Another reason why doctors are less
prone to compromise is because doctors tend to restrict their friendships to
other doctors. Close friendships between doctors and non-doctors are nowhere
near as frequent as among other professions. Consequently, doctors rarely have
to defend their opinions among people who don’t share their background and who
might offer a different point of view. Doctors can develop their philosophy in
relative privacy, foray at intervals into the public scene to promote these
ideas, and then rapidly re­treat to the security of other doctors who support
the views of the in-group. This luxury is not available to others in influential
posi­tions in public life.

Of course, doctors do see their
patients. But they don’t see them as people. The doctor-patient relationship is
more like that between the master and the slave, since the doctor depends on the
complete submission of the patient. In this kind of climate, ideas can hardly be
interchanged with any hope of the doctor’s being affected. Pro­fessional
detachment boils down to the doctor rendering the entire relationship devoid of
human influences or values. Doctors rarely rub elbows with non-doctors in any
other posture but the professional.

Furthermore, since the doctor’s
ambitions project him into the upper classes, that’s where his sympathies lie.
Doctors identify with the upper class and beyond, even. They view themselves as
the true elite class in society. The doctor’s lifestyle and professional
behavior encourage autocratic thinking, so his conservative politics and
economics are predictable. Most doctors are white, male, and rich—hardly in a
position to relate effectively with the poor, the non-white, and females. Even
doctors who come from these groups rarely return to serve and “be with” them.
They, too, become white, male, and rich for all practical purposes and treat
their fel­lows with all the paternalistic contempt other doctors do.

When asked where doctors learn these
bad habits, I used to reply that doctors learned them in medical school. Now I
realize they learn them much earlier than that. By the time they get to
pre­medical training, they’ve picked up the cheating, the competition, the vying
for position — all the tricks they know they need if they want to get into
medical school. After all, our university system is modeled after the medical
schools, and our high schools are modeled after our universities.

The admissions tests and policies of
medical schools virtually guarantee that the students who get in will make poor
doctors. The quantitative tests, the Medical College Admission Test, and the
re­liance on grade point averages funnel through a certain type of per­sonality
who is unable and unwilling to communicate with people. Those who are chosen are
the ones most subject to the authoritarian influences of the priests of Modern
Medicine. They have the compulsion to succeed, but not the will or the
integrity to rebel. The hierarchy in control wants students who will go through
school passively and ask only those questions the professors can answer
comfortably. That usually means they want only one question at a time. One of
the things I advise my students to do in order to survive medical school is to
ask one question but never ask two.

Medical school does its best to turn
smart students stupid, honest students corrupt, and healthy students sick. It
isn’t very hard to turn a smart student into a stupid one. First of all, the
admissions people make sure the professors will get weak-willed,
authority-abiding students to work on. Then they give them a curriculum that is
absolutely meaningless as far as healing or health are con­cerned. The best
medical educators themselves say that the half-life of medical education is four
years. In four years half of what a medical student has learned is wrong. Within
four years of that, half again is wrong, and so on. The only problem is that the
students aren’t told which half is wrong! They’re forced to learn it all.
Super­vision can be very close. There is no school in the country where the
student-teacher ratio is as low as it is in medical school. During the last
couple of years of medical school, you frequently find classes of only two or
three students to one doctor. That doctor has tremen­dous influence over those
students, through both his proximity and his life-and-death power over their
careers.

Medical students are further softened
up by being maliciously fatigued. The way to weaken a person’s will in order to
mold him to suit your purposes is to make him work hard, especially at night,
and never give him a chance to recover. You teach the rat to race. The
result is a person too weak to resist the most debilitating in­strument medical
school uses on its students: fear.

If I had to characterize doctors, I
would say their major psychological attribute is fear. They have a drive to
achieve security-plus that’s never satisfied because of all the fear that’s
drummed into them in medical school: fear of failure, fear of missing a
diagnosis, fear of malpractice, fear of remarks by their peers, fear that
they’ll have to find honest work. There was a movie some time ago that opened
with a marathon dance contest. After a certain length of time all the
contestants were eliminated except one. Everybody had to fail except the winner.
That’s what medical school has become. Since everybody can’t win, everybody
suffers from a loss of self-esteem. Everybody comes out of medical school
feeling bad.

Doctors are given one reward
for swallowing the fear pill so will­ingly and for sacrificing the healing
instincts and human emotions that might help their practice: arrogance.
To hide their fear, they’re taught to adopt the authoritarian attitude and
demeanor of their professors. With all this pushing at one end and pulling at
the other, it’s no wonder that doctors are the major sources of illness in our
society. The process that begins with cheating on a biology exam by moving the
microscope slide so that the next student views the wrong specimen, that
continues with dropping sugar into a urine sample to change the results for
those who follow, with hiring others to write papers and take exams, and with
“dry labbing” ex­periments by fabricating results, ends with falsifying
research reports in order to get a drug approved. What begins with fear and
fatigue over exams and grades ends with a drug or alcohol problem. And what
begins with arrogance towards others ends up as a doctor pre­scribing deadly
procedures with little regard for the life and health of the patient.

My advice to medical students is
always to get out as soon as pos­sible and as easily as possible. The first two
years of medical school are survivable because the students are relatively
anonymous. The student should try his or her best to remain so, since if the
professors don’t know him they can’t get to him. The last two years are more
personal, but the student has more time off to recover from the as­saults. If a
student simply does enough work to pass and doesn’t get all wrapped up in the
roller derby mentality, he or she can make it to the finish line relatively
unscathed. Then, as soon as the student is eligible for a state license, I
advise him to quit. Forget residency and specialty training because there the
professionals have the stu­dent day and night, and he can really be brainwashed.
That’s when the real making of the Devil’s priests occurs.

Doctors are only human. But so are
the rest of us, and sometimes we need the services of all-too-human doctors.
Because the doctor-priest acts as a mediator or a conduit between the individual
and the powerful forces the individual feels he cannot face alone, a faulty
conduit can result in some very powerful energy flowing into the wrong
places. For example, when doctors are compared with other people in evaluating
retarded and other handicapped persons, those who always give the most dismal
predictions and the lowest evalua­tions are the doctors. Nurses are next lowest,
followed by psychologists. The group that always gives the most optimistic
evaluation is the parents. When I’m faced with a doctor who tells me a child
can’t do certain things and parents who tell me that the child can do them, I
always listen to the parents. I really don’t care which group is right or wrong.
It’s the attitude that counts. What­ever attitude is reinforced and encouraged
will prove true. I know doctors are prejudiced against cripples and retarded
people because of their education — which teaches that anyone who is
handicapped is a failure and is better off dead — so I can protect my patients
myself against the doctors’ self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.

Yet doctors continue to get away with
their attitude and their self-serving practices. Even though doctors derive a
great deal of their economic status and power from insurance companies, the
doc­tors are in control. So much in control, in fact, that insurance com­panies
generally act against their own interests when the choice is that or weaken the
power of doctors. Blue Cross and Blue Shield and other insurers logically should
be searching for methods of de­creasing unnecessary utilization of
medical services. Occasionally, we see half-hearted attempts in this direction,
such as the flurry of rules requiring second opinions before elective surgery,
or the every-so-often policy of discontinuing reimbursement for procedures long
fallen into oblivion. These efforts are more window dressing than anything else.
They are introduced with considerable fanfare, rapidly generate a groundswell of
controversy, and then quietly slip away. Regardless of how well-intentioned they
are, they still address them­selves only to the peripheral aspects of medical
care and not to the areas where real money is to be saved. If insurance
companies really wanted to cut costs, they would promote reimbursement for a
wide range of simpler, more effective, cheaper procedures — such as home birth.
And they would allow reimbursement for measures that re­store and maintain
health without drugs or surgery — such as diet therapy and exercise.

One of the most fascinating
statistics I’ve ever run across is one that was reported by the Medical
Economics Company, the publishers of the Physician’s Desk Reference.
Among other questions, they asked a representative sampling of more than 1,700
people, “If you learned that your doctor had lost a malpractice suit, would it
alter your opinion of him?” What amazes me is that seventy-seven percent
of the people said NO!

Now I don’t really know if that means
that people expect their doctors to commit malpractice or if they
don’t care whether he does or not!

I do know that the insurance
companies are bamboozled by the doctors into spending more money than they have
to. I also know that only about seventy doctors lose their licenses every year —
despite all the obvious corruption, sickness, and dangerous malprac­tice. Here
we come to one of the truly wondrous mysteries of Modern ­Medicine. Despite (or
because of?) all that fear and compe­tition among medical students, doctors are
extremely reluctant to report incompetent work or behavior on the part of their
colleagues. If a hospital, for example, discovers malpractice by one of its
doc­tors, the most that will happen is the doctor will be asked to resign. He
won’t be reported to state medical authorities. When he seeks employment
elsewhere, the hospital will most likely give him a shining recommendation.

When the famous Marcus twin-brother
team of gynecologists were found dead of narcotics withdrawal during the summer
of 1975, the news that the doctors were addicts came as a surprise to everyone
but their colleagues. When the brothers’ “problems” were noticed the year before
by the hospital staff, the twins were asked to take a leave of absence to seek
medical care. When they returned to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center,
they were watched for signs that they had improved. They had not. Were they then
whisked off the staff and kept out of touch with patients before any­one was
seriously harmed? Were they reported to state licensing au­thorities? No. They
were told in May that as of July 1, they would not be allowed to
work in the hospital. They were found to have died within days after they lost
the privilege to admit patients to the hospital.

Another favorite example of doctors
allowing their colleagues to commit mayhem on unsuspecting patients occurred in
New Mexico. A surgeon tied off the wrong duct in a gall bladder opera­tion and
the patient died. Although the error was discovered at au­topsy, the doctor was
not disciplined. Apparently, he wasn’t taught the right way to do the operation,
because a few months later he performed it again, wrong — and another patient
died. Again, no punishment and no surgery lesson. Only after the doctor
performed the operation a third time and killed another person was there an
investigation resulting in the loss of his license.

If I had to answer the question of
why doctors are so reluctant to report negligence in the practice of their
colleagues yet so cutthroat when it comes to medical politics and medical school
competition, I go back to the basic emotions engendered in medical school: fear
and arrogance. The resentment doctors are taught to feel for each other as
students is transferred to the patients when the doctor finally gets into his
own practice. Other doctors are no longer the enemy as long as they don’t
threaten to rock the status quo through politics or research which doesn’t
follow the party line. Further­more, the old fear of failure never goes away,
and since the patient is the primary threat to security — by presenting a
problem which must be solved, much like a medical school test — any mistake by a
single doctor threatens the security of all doctors by chalking one up
for the other side. Arrogance on the part of any professional group is always
directed at the outsiders that the group fears most — never at the members of
the same profession.

Obviously, doctors get away with more
arrogance than any other professional group. If Modern Medicine weren’t a
religion, and if doctors weren’t the priests of that religion, they wouldn’t get
away with anywhere near so much. Doctors get away with substantially more than
priests of other religions, because of the peculiarly corrupt nature of Modern
Medicine.

All religions promote and relieve
guilt. To the extent that a religion is able to encourage useful behavior by
promoting guilt and relieving it, that religion is “good.” A religion which
promotes too much guilt and relieves too little, or which encourages the wrong
kind of behavior—behavior which will not result in the improve­ment of the
welfare of the faithful — is a “bad” religion. An example ofhow a
religion promotes and relieves guilt is the almost universal proscription
against adultery. Obviously, if religions didn’t try to make people feel that
adultery was “wrong” and encourage them to feel guilty about it, more and more
people would do it and necessary social structures would weaken. People wouldn’t
know who their parents were, property could not be orderly transferred from
genera­tion to generation, and venereal disease could threaten the existence of
an especially energetic culture.

Doctors are so powerful precisely
because they have, as priests of the Church of Modern Medicine, removed
all the old guilts. Modern Medicine invalidates the old guilts which, strangely
enough, held people to their old religions. Nothing is a “sin” anymore, because
there is a physical consequence, the doctor has the power to fix you up. If you
get pregnant, the doctor can perform an abortion. If you get venereal disease,
the doctor can give you penicillin. If you are gluttonous and damage your heart,
the doctor can give you a coronary bypass. If you suffer from emotional
problems, the doctor has Valium, Librium, and other narcotics to help you get by
with­out caring, or feeling. If those don’t work, there are plenty of
psychiatrists.

There is one “sin” that Modern
Medicine will make you feel guilty about: not going to the doctor.
That’s OK, because the doctor is the priest who takes away every other guilt.
How much harm can there be in guilt that drives you to the doctor every time you
feel sick?

The doctor-priest gets away with a
lot because he can claim to be up against the very Forces of Evil. When a priest
is in a touchy situation and the probability for success is dismal, he escapes
blame by saying that he’s up against the Devil. The doctor-priest does the same
thing. When the prognosis is not good, he retreats into his mortality and admits
that he’s only a man up against the Devil. Then, if he
wins, he’s a hero. If he loses, he’s a defeated hero — but still a hero. Never
is he seen in his true light—as the agent of the Devil.

The doctor never loses, though he
plays both sides against the middle and takes bigger risks than necessary.
That’s because he has succeeded in identifying his rituals as sacred and potent
regardless of their real efficacy. He uses his holiest implements to raise the
ante and make the game more ominous than it really needs to be. If a mother
comes into the hospital with her baby in the breech position and the fetal
monitor says the baby is in distress, the doctor loses time in declaring it a
life-and-death situation — which, indeed, becomes once he starts to perform a
Caesarean-section delivery. Biologically, the doctor knows the C-section is
dangerous. But game is no longer being played by biological rules. It’s a
religious game, a ceremony, and the priest calls the shots. If mother and child
survive, the priest is a hero. If they die, well . . . it was a life-and-death
situation anyway.

The doctor never loses: only the
patients lose. The adage that a doctor buries his mistakes still applies. We
used to refer mistakenly to doctors as airplane pilots. If the plane goes down,
the pilot goes down with it. But the doctor never goes down with the
patient.

Doctors also escape blame by claiming
that their failures are caused by their successes. If you point out, for
example, that a dis­proportionate number of premature babies seem to be turning
up blind in premie nurseries, the doctor will say that it’s the price you have
to pay. “Gee, we managed to save these little I- and 2-pound babies. Of course
they all end up blind and deformed. They’d be dead if we didn’t save them.”
Doctors use the same excuse with the problem of diabetic blindness. The reason
we have so much diabetic blindness, they say, is because we have succeeded in
keeping so many diabetics alive longer. Doctors will use this “we managed to
keep them alive longer” excuse for every disease they have trouble
treating successfully — which includes all the major causes of non-accidental
death. They absolutely ignore the biological facts that creep in and point the
finger at Modern Medicine’s mismanagement of both health and disease. Doctors
even manage to get away with blaming their own disease on their
successes. When you point to the large numbers of dishonest, unhappy, and just
plain sick doctors, the excuse usually runs something like this: “The reason for
the psychological disability is our tendency to be compulsive, perfec­tionistic,
easily given to a sense of guilt if our clinical efforts fail.” A president of
the American Medical Association offered that one.

Doctors protect themselves further
through the sacred language of the priest. A religion must have a sacred
language to separate the discourse of the priesthood from the lowly banter of
the masses. After all, the priests are on speaking terms with the powers that
seep the universe on course. We can’t have just anyone listening in.
Sacred language of doctors is no different from jargon developed by any elitist
group. Its main function is to keep outsiders ignorant. If you could understand
everything your doctor was saying to you and to other doctors, his power over
you would be diminished. So when you get sick because of the generally filthy
conditions in the hospi­tal, he’ll call your infection nosocomial. That
way, you’ll not only not get angry at the hospital, but you’ll feel privileged
to have such a distinguished sounding disease. And too scared to get mad.

Doctors use their semantic privileges
to make you feel stupid and convince you that they are genuinely privy to powers
that you’d bet­ter not mess with. As long as their rituals are mysterious, as
long as they don’t have to justify them biologically, they can get away with
anything. They’re not even subject to the laws of logic. Doctors will, for
example, justify coronary bypasses by saying that everyone who has one feels
better. But if you ask to be treated for cancer with laetrile because everyone
you know who has been treated with it feels better, your doctor will tell you
that it hasn’t been scientifically proved effective.

Semantic isolation also serves to
disenfranchise the individual from the healing process. Since the patient has no
hope of knowing what’s going on, let alone assisting, why allow him or
her any part in the process at all? The patient gets in the way of the ritual,
so get the patient out of the way. That’s one reason why doctors aren’t
in­terested in helping patients maintain their health. To do that, they’d have
to inform them rather than work on them. Doctors aren’t going to
share information, because that means sharing power.

To back them up, doctors have an
enormous tonnage of technological gadgets which proliferates alarmingly. First
of all, the patient must stand in awe of the array of machinery the doctor
assembles to attack his problem. How could any single person — other than the
doctor, who has the power — hope to control such forces? Also, the electronic
wizardry adds weight to the doctor’s claim that he “did everything he could.” If
it’s just a doctor standing there with a black bag, “all that he could” doesn’t
mean very much. But if the doctor throws the switches on $4 million worth of
machinery that fills three rooms, that means he did “all that he could” and then
some!

Typical of any developed religion,
the ceremonial objects in which the most power is concentrated reside in the
Temple. The higher the status of the temple, the more machinery within the
walls. When you get to the cathedrals and the little “Vaticans” of Modern
Medi­cine, you are up against priests who have the weight of infallibility
behind them. They can do no wrong, so they are the most dangerous.

The reforms that have been introduced
in an effort to solve some of the problems I’ve talked about in this chapter
don’t impress me as doing very much good. Rehabilitation programs, for example,
don’t really attack the roots of the sicknesses doctors seem to fall prey to.
That may be a result of their shying away from exposing the prob­lem as a
disease of the core of Modern Medicine. Of course, doctors are not trained to
attack the core of any problem, merely to suppress the symptoms.

Attempts to keep doctors’ knowledge
up-to-date also do little good, since what doctors don’t need is more of
the same kind of in­formation they received in medical school. That’s precisely
what they get in most continuing medical education programs. They’re taught by
the same people who taught them in medical school. Who’s responsible for keeping
them properly informed?

As I’ve already said, you have to
protect yourself. To do that, you need to remember the two major attributes of
doctors: fear and arro­gance. What you have to do is learn how to work on his
fears with­out challenging his arrogance until you have the winning hand. Since
doctors are scared of you and what you can do to them, you shouldn’t hesitate to
use that fear. Doctors are scared of lawyers, not because lawyers are so
powerful but because lawyers can ally them­selves with you, whom the doctor
really fears. If a doctor does you dirty, sue him. It is in courts and
juries that you’re most likely to find common sense. Find a good lawyer who
knows a lot about medicine and who is not afraid to put a doctor through the
ringer. If there’s one thing a doctor doesn’t like it’s to be in court on the
wrong end of a lawyer — because that’s one place where the patient has allies
that can effectively challenge the doctor’s priestly immu­nity. The increase in
malpractice suits is encouraging, since it means more and more people are being
radicalized to the point where they challenge the doctor’s power to determine
the rules.

If your doctor gives you trouble but
not enough to take him to court, you need to be careful about how much you
challenge him —not because of what he can or cannot do to you, but because
how far you go will determine your effectiveness. If a doctor threatens you
and becomes angry, you should stand up to him. Don’t back down. Threaten him
back. When a person really threatens a doctor, the doctor almost always backs
down if the per­son shows that he means it. Doctors back down all the time
because they figure, “What do I need this one kook for?”

It’s important, though, not to
threaten a doctor unless you are prepared to carry through. In other words,
don’t reveal your rebel­lion until you have to, until you have the emotional
commitment and the physical capability to carry on a successful campaign. Don’t
get into an argument with a doctor with the hope of changing his mind on
anything. Never say to the doctor who’s treating you for cancer with traditional
chemotherapy, “Doc, what do you think about laetrile?” You won’t get anywhere,
and you won’t get any laetrile, either. Don’t say to the doctor who recommends a
security bottle for your baby, “But I’m breastfeeding and I don’t want to do
that.” Don’t bring your doctor columns from the newspaper expect­ing him to
change his mind or try something new. Don’t challenge him until you’re ready
with an alternative action. Do your own homework.

What does a Catholic do when he
decides that his priests are no good? Sometimes he directly challenges them, but
very seldom. He just leaves the Church. And that’s my answer. Leave the Church
of Modern Medicine. I see a lot of people doing that today. I see a lot of
people going to chiropractors, for example, who wouldn’t have been caught dead
in a chiropractor’s office a few years ago.

I see more and more people
patronizing the heretics of Modern Medicine.